After Earnings, Insider Sales at Financials

By Sam Mamudi

REUTERS

Sales

With their quarterly earnings out of the way and stocks at multi-year highs, executives at some financial services firms have been selling shares.

Three Morgan Stanley (MS) executives — Deputy CFO Paul Wirth, Chief Risk Officer Keishi Hotsuki and Thomas Colm Kelleher, president of the institutional services unit — sold close to $3 million of stock last week. It’s the first cluster sale by Morgan Stanley executives in at least 10 years, according to InsiderScore, and they came with the bank’s stock at a roughly 18-month high.

As InsiderScore notes:

The sales coincided with the vesting of restricted stock, but none of the sellers disposed of shares last year when restricted stock vested; and, the sales came as the stock traded to a new 52-week high following a blowout earnings announcement.

Morgan Stanley didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Over at Raymond James Financial (RJF), there were even bigger chunks being sold off: Executive Chairman Thomas James sold $13.4 million worth of shares. James was one of four executives, including COO Dennis Zank and CFO Jeffrey Julien, involved in sales totaling close to $16 million. As with Morgan Stanley, the sales came in the wake of good earnings results and with the stock at a high, in the case of Raymond James an all-time level. A Raymond James spokesman noted that the holdings are fairly small slices of each man’s holdings — in the case of James (admittedly an extreme case), it amounts to 1.9% of his Raymond James stock.

It shouldn’t really be surprising to see executives taking advantage of stock highs to make some money; these aren’t sales that necessarily set off alarm bells. But still, it’s instructive to see that when it comes to their own firms, some top figures on Wall Street have decided to take what’s on the table.

Copyright 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our
Subscriber Agreement
and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit